What to do after CogSci?

Twenty-four registered occupations, and the three things that decide which of them you end up in.

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing.
It also depends on what sort of person you are. C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

The MA in Applied Cognitive Science is built to be customised, and where it leads depends a good deal on how you customise it. Graduates go into research, into industry, into public institutions, and into work that did not have a name ten years ago. The module you choose in the first year, and the electives you put around it, are what turn a wide field into a particular kind of career.

What the choice turns on

Three things shape it more than anything else, and you control two of them.

  • Your interests

    What you read about when nobody has set the task. The least formal of the three, and usually the one that outlasts the other two.

  • Your undergraduate major

    This is a second degree, so you arrive already carrying something: a language, a laboratory method, a proof, a codebase. It stays with you and it shows in the work you go on to do.

  • Your graduate choices

    The module you take, the electives you add to it, the partner project you join and the thesis you write. This is the part still open on the day you enrol.

Each of the positions below is a registered occupation. The list is curated and kept to roles a graduate of this programme is qualified to hold. They are arranged by the kind of work each one asks for — four groups, reading roughly from the analytical to the organisational. Most of our graduates find that two or three of the groups are open to them, not one.

Where the degree leads

Twenty-four positions, arranged by the kind of work each one asks for.

    • Analytics management
    • Data analysis
    • Data visualization
    • Digital analytics
    • Biomedical data analysis
    • Linguistic analysis
    • Artificial intelligence
    • Cognitive robotics
    • Image and speech recognition
    • Software development
    • Research and development
    • Product development
    • Human-computer interface (HCI)
    • User experience (UX/UI)
    • Human factors
    • Ergonomics
    • Multimedia design
    • Product design
    • Project management
    • Human resources
    • Innovation
    • Digital communication
    • Education and technology
    • Game design

Very few of these are reached by a single route. If you already know which one you want, the first-year module is where to start. If you do not, that is a good reason to come: few degrees let one student try a laboratory, a codebase and a partner project in the same year, and this one is designed for people who are still deciding.